• Swimming upstream Swimming upstream The most important differences between hatchery-raised salmon and wild salmon may turn out to be trees and federal law. More specifically, they may be the timber that could be harvested along rivers in the Pacific
• Swimming upstream
Swimming upstream
The most important differences between hatchery-raised salmon and wild salmon may turn out to be trees and federal law.
More specifically, they may be the timber that could be harvested along rivers in the Pacific Northwest and the federal Endangered Species Act.
Salmon – wild salmon, that is – are protected under federal law. Their numbers have been declining for years as a result of overfishing and the construction of dams that prevent many of the fish from reaching their spawning grounds upriver. More importantly, the population of wild salmon has been declining despite scores of hatcheries that have been churning out millions of salmon for decades. Most of those fish are released into local rivers.
As long as salmon and steelhead remain on the endangered species list, timber companies can’t cut the trees along those heavily forested rivers. Doing so would damage water quality and harm the fish.
Three years ago, a timber-industry lawyer named Mark C. Rutzick had an idea: If hatchery-raised salmon were counted along with their wild cousins when assessing the species’ health, the salmon population in the Pacific Northwest would be substantially greater – maybe even great enough to get them off the endangered species list. And that would allow timber companies to cut more trees along the rivers.
To fisheries biologists, the suggestion is preposterous. It’s like counting animals in a zoo to gauge the status of a population in the wild. But Mr. Rutzick’s legalistic argument wasn’t intended for biologists. Rather, it was crafted to win over the Bush administration, which is full of people like Mr. Rutzick. Mr. Rutzick is now a legal adviser to the National Marine Fisheries Service, which last month released a draft plan to count hatchery salmon along with their wild cousins, just as Mr. Rutzick proposed.
It’s a bad idea that further threatens the health of endangered wild salmon. The Bush administration should reject this plan, and Congress should make sure that it does.
But there is also a larger issue here as this case so vividly illustrates. As a high-ranking political appointee, Mr. Rutzick is one of many whom the Bush administration plucked from the mining, oil and timber industries to head departments that regulate their former employers. Federal agencies that were once dedicated to protecting natural resources are now being run by people bent on exploiting them.
Congress has a responsibility to stand up to these short-sighted policies. It will be a tough, upstream swim. But unless Congress finds the spine to make it, our children will inherit a world where wilderness exists only in faded photographs and “wild” salmon were all born in a hatchery’s concrete tanks.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
